Inkscape Video Tutorial

well hello internet and welcome to part 1 of my Inkscape video tutorial I've been getting a lot into how to design interfaces in my android tutorial and of course it's always great to be able to get a free piece of software that is almost as good as Adobe Illustrator so in the next couple tutorials I'm going to show you exactly how to do most everything inside of Inkscape so I have a lot to do so let's get into it okay so the very first thing you're going to want to do is go to Inkscape dot org and download Inkscape and in what's awesome about it is it works on any operating system and even better yet all of the key code shortcuts or exactly the same for every operating system so if you're using Ubuntu Linux Mac OSX windows anything it's going to work and you can get all that at Inkscape org and it's so easy to install not even going to bother showing you how to do that let's just start using it ok and this is basically Inkscape and i'm going to go through what all of these different things do here and across the top and all these things over here and the swatch is down here and everything one of the very first things I want to do however is you are given a default page that you are to work with if you would like I'm going to get rid of it all together how you do that is you come down here where it has document properties and click on that and then this dialog pops up here since I want to get rid of that I just want to go to show page border and say no and while we are here you can see that we can set our default units and this is going to be for our rulers and pretty much everything else and we can also define all of our different letters and document types we want to use create custom sizes and do all kinds of other different things but I am done with that so I'm just going to close that for now when I said rulers I was talking about these guys up here and if you want to turn those on or off you just go control or control R they're back on and this is where we would change our default units as well now I'm going to step through all of these guys over here one by one and talk about shortcuts and roughly what they do this right here is our selector tool and the shortcut for it is s very very easy to remember and this is going to allow you to select move scale skew all kinds of things in regards to moving around with your objects then we have our node tool which shortcut is N and if you can't remember nu can just think of how the letter n looks kind of like lines connected with points and that's how I remember that and of course that's going to allow us since we are using vector art or a whole bunch of nodes with lines between them that's going to allow us to edit the nodes change a straight line into a curve do all kinds other things we'll see more about that later then we have the tweak tool right here which looks kind of like a wave and the shortcut is W it's going to do all kinds of really funky crazy things which are better explained just by showing how they work then we have our zoom tool which is Z which is going to allow us to zoom in zoom out zoom to the page size zoom to fit all of our different objects and so forth and so on then we have our rectangle tool shortcut is are going to allow us to draw rectangles which in a second I'm going to show you how to do that then next we have our 3d tool which shortcut is X and the way I remember that is because we're going to be drawing in a 3d dimension that makes you think of XY diagrams which look like a cross or an X shape then we have the ellipse tool of course draws ellipses circles and a whole bunch of other different things arcs all kinds of stuff you'll see of course the shortcut for it is e then we have our polygon tool or star tool that is just going to be either shift 8 or the star symbol and that's how we're going to pop that up gonna look into that in more detail here in a second then we have the spiral tool and when I see spiral I think insane and the shortcut for that is I of course we have our pencil tool which the shortcut of course is P for pencil and we have our Bezier curve or however you pronounce that and that's going to allow us to draw our points in our lines and so forth which is the best tool if we're using vector art or working with vector art so of course being the best tool the shortcut is B and there that is then we have the calligraphy brush we have the text tool which of course is T whoops I forgot the calligraphy brush that is C then we have our spray tool which is an awesome spray can so of course the shortcut is a then we have our big eraser which of course is going to be shift e or capital e because it's our big eraser and we have our fill tool and this looks like paint being spilled and what would you say if you spilled paint uh-oh shortcut is you then we have our gradient tool which is G then we have our eye dropper shortcut is D and then we have this thing called the diagram connector which I've never actually used but if you want to use it the shortcut is o and if we move down inside of here you can see here are our swatches that we can drag and drop on all of our objects as well as fill and Stroke oh here stands for opacity this little eyeball right here is going to toggle if we want to see our current layer or not can also toggle through the layers with this guy over here and if we zoom out and zoom over here you'll see a whole bunch of different things that I almost never use this is for new reason why is ctrl n opens up a new document so why worry about that ctrl o or this little folder shape is going to open up a document we previously worked with there's the Save symbol which is ctrl s almost everything is controlled by the way print is ctrl P this guy right here is going to allow us to import and I don't even know what that symbol is oh it's control I know that's easy to remember it's going to allow us to import different graphics as well as SVG files or scalable vector graphics but don't worry you'll be able to use EPS and PDFs and a whole bunch of other different things this guy right here is going to export let's shift ctrl E and we could export in ping that's the normal way to do it then we have our undo and we have our redo which I don't really normally worry about those except for ctrl Z which is an undo this guy right here is going to copy our selection to the clipboard this is going to be cut this is going to be paste which of course we use ctrl X and ctrl V all the time this is going to zoom in so that whatever we have selected is showing on the screen this is going to zoom in to make sure that all the objects are on this this is going to zoom in to make sure that the document itself is on the screen and yes those work even if you don't have a little page drawn inside of your canvas window this guy is going to duplicate any object that you might have and that's just ctrl D for duplicate this is going to create a clone which I almost never do basically what it means is if you create an object and then you say I want to create a clone of it if you change one object the other one gets changed if you decide you're not happy with that anymore this little guy right here it will allow you to break those objects apart this guy right here is a snap to grid this is a snap to guide which we'll get into here in a second this guy's going to group which is ctrl G or ungroup objects which basically if we group them that just means if we move one we move the other and ungroup basically takes that away all right and that is all I'm going to cover for right now I am however going to open up a whole bunch of dialogues here one way to do that this is going to be the stroke and fill dialogue let's click on that and you will see there it pops up say fill and stroke then we can also go to text but for some weird reason this doesn't dock so you know that's kind of silly but of course we're going to need that this guy right here is for layers let's open that up as well this guy right here is for editing the XML document which everything inside of Inkscape is an XML document we're not going to worry about that right now and this is going to allow us to align and transform our objects so we opened all of those different guys up this is an HD video so if you can't see it view it full screen and everything will be wonderful now what I like to do when I open up all these dialogues actually I'm going to open up a couple more let's go over to view first and scroll down through here and we can open up our swatches library as well and that just opened that up right there and then I'm going to go into object and I'm also going to get rows and columns which is way down here rows and columns there it is so now I have every dialog all here in one place but it's kind of a mess you might think well what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click right here at the top of this drag it until it's centered and drop it then I'm gonna do that with all of them it's going to click inside of here drag until it's in the center can't tell if you can see that there's like a square there drop it and do exactly the same thing for the layers drag in the center drop it and then do it for the fill drag it put it in the center and drop it now what I'm going to be able to do is switch between all those different types of tools just by clicking these buttons and that's the way I like it you might not and your way is the best way so just do it that way across the top of the screen you're going to have what is called the tool control bar and it is going to change every single time you change your tools so that's why it's called the tool control bar and we'll get more into exactly what happens up there whenever all that gets selected and mainly the other shortcuts that I use all of the time while I'm just thrown in rectangles here is control a which selects all of our different objects zoom in here on them undo like I said before was control Z so there I got rid of it there I brought it back with control shift Z you can zoom in or zoom out on the screen quickly by just pressing plus or minus on your keyboard if you want to throw grids up on this screen you just hit the number sign which kind of looks like a grid which is very very useful and guides you know you could either just come over here let's get the selection tool s and then you can drag a guide out however you would like and then of course we have the group which is control G they are together if we move one we move them both or control U which is an ungroup and there is a couple other ones that I use all the time but I'm not gonna just spend this whole entire tutorial showing you shortcuts and we're going to go over their shortcuts a whole bunch times if you want to get rid of the guide you just click on them and drag them off the screen and they just go away ok so now I'm going to go through some of these different tools that we have over here and the first woman to cover is the rectangle tool so I'm going to hit R just to bring up that shortcut and then we can draw a great big giant rectangle on the screen now if I want to edit this guy well I can go and hit the S buttons for select and you can see that these little arrows pop up and they basically say well you are able to scale this rectangle however you would like if however you'd like to rotate it click it again with the selection tool you'll be able to rotate it right like that also another thing you can do let me zoom out here a bit is you can skew the rectangle and how we're going to do that is go to the middle parts and you can see how I am skewing it and Inkscape normally is not this slow their only reason it's slow like this is because I'm videotaping this while I'm talking and using it let's delete that and switch back to rectangle again now if you hold the ctrl key while you are drawing the size is going to change in increments see how it's sort of like jumps say in increments and those increments would be two to one or three to one and when I say that I mean that the height is going to be one and the width is going to be two or three in that situation if you don't hold the control key it's just going to allow you to do pretty much anything and you can think about this throughout Inkscape and know that this will pretty much always be true if you're holding down the control key you're basically incrementing something whether it is incrementing ever increasing sizes for a rectangle or what have you that is normally what the control key does whenever you are using it in Inkscape if you instead hold down the shift key while drawing a rectangle it's going to draw from the center of the screen instead of drawing from the top to the bottom see how that's different versus holding the shift key comes out of the middle like that and in general that's pretty much all you're going to do with the rectangle for now you're going to skew it you're going to rotate it you're going to increase the size of course we are going to get into gradients and changing colors and all that other stuff here in a minute then just to briefly go over it this is the 3d tool and the shortcut for it of course is X and this guy is going to allow you to draw three-dimensional objects and basically just click and three-dimensional squares basically as you can see there on your screen if you want to move this around you can see there's a little X here and if you click on it while you are still in the three-dimensional tool you can see that it is moving around in three-dimensional space that's kind of neat now on this three-dimensional shape there are things called handle that or these guys right here and with them you're going to be able to size your three-dimensional space and also going to be able to project them into the z space or increase how far they go away from you or however you want to think about that you would also be able to change the color for this three dimensional space by holding down the control key and clicking one of them that would allow you to come in here and then change the color for one of those if that's something you'd want to do then we come into the fact that this gap here has changed angle Y in this situation for our three-dimensional shape is going to represent let me just click this whole thing the angle of this which is called a vanishing point so if we change that you can see that the angle for that top X vanishing point as moving that way the red lines in this situation are also these are all vanishing points are going to make changes on the X dimension while the Y vanishing point are going to make changes on the Y vanishing points and there's basically four handles that are going to allow you to reshape the sides while the other four are going to change the depth so these are the handles and allow you to change the sides and these are the handles that are going to allow you to change the depth as is that one right there like I said before the center handle or this X shape here when clicked is going to allow you to move the object around and if you hold down the shift key while you are using it it's going to allow you to change the depth of the three-dimensional object I don't worry if you can't remember all this I'm basically just covering everything just to make sure you get a basic gist of how these tools work then we get into the ellipse tool which is over here and the shortcut for it is e of course of course with this guy you're going to be able to make ellipses you're going to circles and you're going to be able to make arcs and also like pie shaped type things if whenever you are using the ellipse tool you hold down the control key this is going to constrain your drawing and there you can see that it's making like a pie shape if we come up here and decide we would instead like it to be an ark click on that and now it's an ark and if we decide instead we'd like it to be a circle we click on that and now it's a circle just like before if you hold down the shift key when drawing an ellipse it's going to draw it from the center like you see right there and if you want to make sure that you draw a perfect circle lip still remember is a shortcut want to hold down the ctrl and the Alt key at the same time that's gonna make sure that it can strange the proportions to make sure that it is a perfect circle now just like the rectangle the square tools are going to change the scaling for our ellipse and in this situation the circle is actually going to be different ends of an arc so we can click on it and we can create a pacman shape like that and then this is going to be the endpoint and we can go and move that around as well everything's pretty consistent inside of Inkscape so basically after you learn how to use one tool you'll pretty much be able to walk your way through how to work with the other ones and of course you can also change the starting arc position and the ending one by playing around with that and you can zoom out and we can do it again say of course you have to select it and you can see there see how it's moving around so that is a very useful tool now we'll go into and take a look at the star or the polygon tool shortcut is star of course shift eight there it is of course it is going to allow you to do all kinds of funky things actually this is a pretty useful tool let's go and reset all of our settings for this guy by just clicking there and there you can see that we have a basic star shape it also has squares on it and those are handles that we can use to change the way that our star looks pretty cool very very adaptive if we delete that hold down control guess what it does it constrains it so that it only moves or rotates at 15 degrees at a time shift is going to draw it from the center just like it always does and then we get to these funky guys up here and exactly what they do now corners is pretty self-explanatory it's basically going to increase the number or decrease the number of corners in your polygon shape or your star shape you're also going to be able to change your spa ratio with star and you can see that that's just moving those center points out and eventually it will become a regular polygon if you keep doing that by smoke gray show I mean that guy right there and basically as you play around with Inkscape you're going to find that these guys specifically the polygon and start tool are best played with and experimented with but I'm going to show you it because a face value it doesn't really look like it does much but you can create numerous different types of shapes just using this polygon tool so we could do something like let's just draw this right that and then let's say that we want to change our number of corners to I don't know 500 like that and you can see that it created this funky sort of object II weird thing kind of neat just playing around another thing that you could do let's just delete that for now is let's say that you needed to draw like a path of rocks or something like that what you could do is switch into your polygon tool and then let's just leave five corners as it is let's go into round it because we want more of a rounded type polygon if these are going to be rocks and let's just increase that I don't know two point three for example and then let's take randomized and take that up to one point seven so they've been one point seven like that zoom out and then let's change to a more rocky type of look color wise and we can just start drawing well that's up I know why cuz that's a star well this is how you'd make a puddle type thing kind of funky looking for weird starfish patek something I'm looking for selection tool delete jump back into our polygon tool star and let's jump over here and click on polygon there we go now if we want to come in here and draw some rocks you can draw these are all yellow rocks but you can see that it's sort of like a rocky pattern that is completely randomized and really funky and there is just a ton of different really cool things you can do in regards to this inside of Inkscape if we want to change all our colors let's just select everything this is a solid color and then let's say we want a reddish brown quite get all of them oh there's a nice brown and there we go looks kind of rocky type so that is the star and polygon tool then the last I'm going to look at here is the spiral tool which is this card here remember I for insane click on that and we can just start drawing some spirals now the big thing about the spiral tool is these guys and understanding how these three guys work in fact you're probably not gonna use the spiral tool that much but what the heck were here so let's go and look at it first you have turns now as turns is increased basically what it's going to monitor or change is how many full circles we're going to draw before we get to the outer end and by outer end I mean this point down here that's the outer end so let's go in here you'll see as we increase that you're just going to have a bigger spiral drawing drawing drawing divergence or this guy right here controls whether as the spiral whines if the distance between the arcs is going to change so if we have our spiral here you can see as I increase that it's tighter in the middle and then as it gets outwards it is bigger or has bigger spaces in between it and then we have inner radius and what that is going to do for us is it's probably better explained by just saying if it's a zero meaning that the inner radius is set to zero that means that the spiral is going to start in the center of our spiral now if we increase that you're going to say whoop too much there we go it's basically going to draw the spiral in so inner radius is basically just going to control where exactly with our spiral the spiral is going to start drawing so that is a ton of different things in a good overview of some of the tools inside of Inkscape in the next part of the tutorial i'm going to walk through all of these different guys how the fills and all the rows and column swatches align distribute layers fills and strokes and a whole bunch of other different things work please leave any questions or comments below otherwise till next time

Channel: Derek Banas

Views: 897,999

Keywords: Inkscape Video Tutorial, Inkscape (Software), Tutorial (Industry)

Id: zUIOEXssTSE

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2013